Book of the Month – April 2017 – Mind over Medicine

I read this book by Lissa Rankin a couple of years ago, and really loved it. It’s called Mind Over Medicine, and in this book Dr Rankin looks into the placebo effect.

Dr Rankin is a traditionally trained allopathic doctor. Which means she’s been taught the Western model of medicine. Reductionist and treating symptoms style of medicine. Sometimes a useful practise. Not normally for chronic conditions, but for acute injuries, illnesses, very useful.

What Dr Rankin was fascinated with was the so-called miraculous healing that some patients got. Without medical intervention, or when modern medicine failed them or couldn’t help. How did these people get better? Why did some get better, some not?

This led her to look into the placebo effect. The effect that the mind can have on a person’s healing. In fact, pharmaceutical companies have to prove that their drugs work better than placebo. Placebo (whereby you think it’s doing you good, so it does – even when you are taking an inert medicine with no actual benefits) works on average 30% of the time. Sometimes less, and many times much much more. In order for a drug to pass, one of the criteria is that it works better than just taking a placebo.

(Side note, there is also the nocebo effect whereby you think something is doing you bad and it eventually does. A classic example might be a doctor giving you a terminal diagnosis of how long you will live – which they can’t possibly know unless they are fortune tellers – and then the person might pass away to the day!)

What Dr Rankin did was to review and research hundreds of objectively evaluated, peer-reviewed studies from medical journals to find proof that the mind can heal the body. And she describes some amazing things in this book.

If you are traditionally trained as a doctor and don’t buy into all this mumbo jumbo stuff, I urge you to take a closer look at this book and the work by Dr David Hamilton.

It will trip you out.

What about you? Have you had any experience with the mind healing when medicine couldn’t? Have you read this book? Let me know below.